Top Schools Report Record Recruiting Rebounds for MBA Students

Top companies are pulling out all the stops to lure top MBA candidates to work for them upon graduation, including spending more and starting the recruiting process earlier, according to a recent Financial Times article. Indeed, some schools are starting their recruitment efforts before business school students even arrive on campus.

Deloitte Consulting, for instance, launched a new immersion weekend in 2010 for incoming MBA students that is held a month before school starts, the FT reports. “Getting in earlier is critical,” Chris Franck, a principal at Deloitte, told the FT. Deloitte pays for meals, transport and hotels for several hundred students to take part in the immersion weekend because it provides an advantage over companies that don’t start until the school year begins. Franck estimates that the company has hired 450 MBAs worldwide from 40 schools for 2013.

Other companies, too, are starting well before the traditional on-campus interview during the first semester that has traditionally been a staple of the recruiting routine. Lisa Feldman, executive director of MBA career management at the University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, told the FT that she is seeing more companies that are eager to host smaller gatherings to make early connections with students. “It’s important to work hard in order to find students that find them [the company] interesting,” she said.

Companies like Johnson & Johnson and BCG Consulting also are doing more to compete for top MBA students, including hosting informal dinners for students, investing more to maintain continuous relationships with schools and visiting campus several times during the fall to make presentations, according to the FT report.

“We assign a consultant basically to go and live on campus full-time for the fall and to spend all day and every day there over the course of recruiting,” Deloitte’s Franck told the FT. And J&J sends at least one recruiter to visit about 40 top business schools 30 times a year.

And the money these companies are spending on recruiting is significant, the FT reports. According to Jack Gainer, CEO of online MBA recruiting platform MBA Focus, companies spend about $10,000 to $20,000 per MBA hire. Haas’ Feldman told the FT that sponsoring a club event or dinner, meanwhile, can run a company $3,000.

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